one cannot take a fortress by this method—such was the situation when part or the majority came to the conclusion that one must abandon the assault and transition to a siege. If an error in tactics proved to be the case, then one must make an end of this error, and everything connected with it must be recognized as an obstacle to activity, which demands change: one must end the assault and transition to a siege, to a different disposition of forces, to a redistribution of material resources, not to mention individual methods and operations. What came before must decisively, precisely and clearly be recognized as an error, so as not to create an obstacle to the development of new strategy and tactics, to the development of operations, which must now proceed in an entirely different manner and which, as we know, ended in complete success, although over a period incomparably longer than had been anticipated.

I think that this example serves to clarify the situation in which our revolution found itself in resolving its socialist tasks in the sphere of economic construction. Two periods in this respect stand out with complete clarity. On the one hand, the period approximately from the beginning of 1918 to the spring of 1921, and on the other—the period in which we find ourselves from the spring of 1921 onward.

If you recall those declarations, official and unofficial, which our party made from the end of 1917 until the beginning of 1918, you will see that we had even then a conception that the development of the revolution, the development of the struggle, could proceed either by a relatively brief path or a very long and difficult one. But in evaluating the possible development, we proceeded, in the main—indeed, I do not recall any exceptions—from assumptions, not always perhaps openly expressed, but always tacitly presupposed—from assumptions about the immediate transition to socialist construction. I deliberately reread what was written, for example, in March and April 1918 about the tasks of our revolution in the sphere of socialist construction*,

* See Collected Works, 5th edition, vol. 36, pp. 78-82, 165-208, 283-314. Ed.

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and convinced myself that we indeed possessed such an assumption.

This was precisely the period when such an essential task—and one that was necessarily preliminary in the political respect—as the task of taking power, of creating a Soviet system of state in place of the former bourgeois-parliamentary one, had already been resolved, and then the task of exit from the imperialist war, which exit, as is known, was accompanied by extraordinarily heavy sacrifices, by the conclusion of an incredibly humiliating Brest Peace that imposed almost impossible conditions. After the conclusion of this peace, the period from March to summer 1918 was a period when military tasks seemed to be resolved. Subsequently, events showed that this was not the case, that in March 1918, after the resolution of the imperialist war task, we were only approaching the beginning of civil war, which from summer 1918 onward, in connection with the Czechoslovak uprising, began to mount ever more. Then, in March or April 1918, speaking of our tasks, we were already counterposing to the methods of gradual transition such methods of action as the method of struggle, directed primarily toward the expropriation of the expropriators, toward that which characterized primarily the first months of the revolution, i.e., the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918. And already then it became necessary to say that our work in the sphere of organizing accounting and control had fallen far behind the work and activity in the expropriation of the expropriators. This meant that we had expropriated much more than we had been able to account for, control, manage, etc., and thus there arose a shift from the task of expropriation, of destruction of the power of exploiters and expropriators, to the task of organizing accounting and control, to prosaic, so to speak, economic tasks of direct construction. And already then at a whole series of points we needed to move backward. For example, in March and April 1918, there arose such a question as the remuneration of specialists at rates corresponding not to socialist relations, but to bourgeois relations, i.e., at rates,

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